


Forgotten

by melimarron



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: A little bit cracky, Canon Compliant, Death, Emma freaks after The Lunchroom Scene, Existential Crisis, Gen, Surprisingly, you'll understand once you read the last line
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25875664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melimarron/pseuds/melimarron
Summary: Emma Barnes goes back to Brockton Bay after Leviathan expecting everything to be fine.It isn't.
Relationships: Emma Barnes & Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver
Comments: 8
Kudos: 56





	Forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I wrote this fic at 1 AM so it is Not Very Coherent. I'll reread it tomorrow and make sure it actually makes sense.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Emma Barnes doesn’t realize that she’s been forgotten until years after the fact.

* * *

It’s business as usual, at first. The Barnes family rolls into Brockton, marveling at the destruction Leviathan had caused. They get a pamphlet of the zones of the city- it’s been taken over by the Undersiders- and they memorize which zones to avoid.

Emma privately thinks that they all sound, well,  _ strong _ . If Sophia were here, she’d have to have some kind of respect for Skitter, at least. Sophia would never respect Grue, with the ways he fucked with her powers, and Regent was a total pushover, and Tattletale was, quite frankly, a soft bitch.

But Skitter, their leader- now  _ there _ was a person to admire.

Emma goes to school- Arcadia, since Winslow had been sort of destroyed in the Endbringer fight- and at first she thinks everything’s okay. Everyone’s carrying a weapon for some goddamn reason, but it’s whatever. Nobody would dare attack her. Her father’s a lawyer. She’d be fine.

Much to her surprise,  _ Taylor _ is at Arcadia, too. Skinny, weak, Taylor, with her flat chest and dead eyes hidden behind thick glasses and wide lips. It’s a surprise, to be sure- Taylor had more-or-less dropped out of school after the locker prank, there’s no way she had good enough grades to qualify for the summer school catch-up course. 

But this means she has a chance to prove herself as the strongest person in the school. Taylor is the epitome of the weakness that she had carved out a year and a half ago, and now she has a chance to squash this worm once and for all.

Things don’t go as planned.

And by the end of the day, Emma’s world has been shattered.

Taylor is Skitter.

Taylor is a fucking  _ warlord _ .

Emma was never strong. Sophia had lied to her. Taylor was never weak. If Emma had imagined herself to be a lion, then Taylor was a snake, waiting, biding her time, then striking at the most opportune moment.

God.

She’d never been a predator. She’d believed the lies Sophia had fed her and she’d turned on her best friend, her wonderful sunshiney chatterbox friend who had just wanted some normalcy after her mother’s death and-

And she’d tried to prove her strength by ripping down her sunshiney friend and shoving her into a locker of filth and somehow, somewhere in the haze of betrayal and rotting blood, Taylor Hebert had become Skitter, warlord, supervillain, murderer.

The realization crushes her.

For the first time, she thinks she might be able to understand Taylor, her ambitious, driven friend who had become a supervillain to try to fix Brockton Bay. She might be able to understand Sophia, the corrupt Ward who killed and laughed about it and went even more off the deep end than she already had and who had become a superhero by force.

But she doesn’t. She doesn’t think through her actions nearly as much as she needs to, never quite has a bad enough day that she just  _ snaps. _

And so she lives her life, and she thinks about Taylor Hebert.

Her life has revolved around Taylor and her false weakness for so long, it’s easy to just fixate on Weaver-Skitter-Taylor and her heroic misdeeds and contemplate just how badly she’s fucked up.

She’s unleashed Taylor goddamn Hebert on the world.

_ Why hasn’t she killed me yet? _

Childhood sentimentality? They’d practically been sisters, after all. But Emma had destroyed that, so that couldn’t be right.

Because Taylor wanted her to suffer? That would make sense, but why, then, hadn’t Taylor returned to try to attack her? Was she supposed to stay in suspense?

Or, maybe, because Taylor didn’t give a shit about her now? This was the worst option, and it’s the most difficult one for Emma to face. But how could Taylor just…  _ forget _ about thirteen years of friendship, of two and a half years of solid bullying? How could Taylor not care about the ways Emma had thrown her dead mother or the locker into her face?

She decides that it has to be the second option. Taylor’s a supervillain. Supervillains lie.

It can’t be the last one. She can’t just be-  _ forgotten _ .

But she can’t shake the niggling feeling that Taylor was telling the truth, that day at school, just before she’d revealed her identity.

That’s what breaks her, what turns her into a machine.

She shuffles through her days, trying to figure out what made Taylor tick. They’d had thirteen years of friendship- this should be easy. 

It isn’t.

Sometime in the intervening years where she is just a machine, she registers that somehow, Taylor’s become a Ward.

Emma can’t quite bring herself to care. She researches it, sure, and is properly horrified, then immediately goes back to articles about the bank Taylor had robbed, trying to figure out what had made her take such a drastic leap.

She remembers Taylor from childhood, a tall, skinny kid with a dream to become  _ just like Alexandria _ .

Well, guess what, kid Taylor? Your older self is a fucking supervillain-turned-Ward who murdered Alexandria and the director of the PRT by  _ drowning them in bugs. _

She’d laugh if it weren’t so terrifying, if she didn’t think that every fly that buzzed around her head might decide to fly down her throat and choke her.

She sleepwalks through life, and then one day, Britain is just- fucking gone. The entire fucking country. Somehow.

Her parents are screaming outside her bedroom door. Something about someone going crazy. Something about Scion. Something about the  _ goddamn apocalypse or some shit, unlock this fucking door, Emma Barnes. _

Emma takes a breath. She will not open the door.

She had never been a predator. She had only ever been a housecat, at best, something that thought of itself as an unbeatable machine, but ultimately wore a collar and lived primarily in a safe environment. 

Sophia and Taylor- they were the  _ real _ predators. They went out in their masks and they fought the worst parts of the world, even if Sophia went out as a hero, until she went (more) crazy, and Taylor used to go out as a villain and fought with spiders and beetles and bees surrounding her until she became a hero and started smothering people with butterflies.

(She still does not understand how Taylor could have killed a guy with nothing but butterflies. That’s just baffling.)

She is lower than a housecat, actually. She’s nothing. She’s forgotten.

At best, she’s just another piece on the chess board that Taylor controls. But she knows, somewhere deep down, that she isn’t worthy of a second thought anymore.

She’s been forgotten. She’s no better than a worm.

There’s a bright golden light outside, and Emma can only muster up a single thought before the light consumes her, staring at the wall of her room and filled with the same self-loathing she can only assume Taylor felt.

_ Take that, _ she thinks.  _ You worm. _

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I did just write an entire fic just for a meme. What are you going to do about it? 
> 
> (In my defense, it was 1 AM and I didn't have anything better to do because I'm a teenager and sleep is more of a suggestion than anything else. And it was funny at the time.)


End file.
